Bad Girls by Rebecca Chance Read Free Book Online Page B

and misted her hair with it, the chemical tang of hairspray adding to all the other odours in the dressing room: nail-varnish remover, sweat, body spray, perfume, and traces of cigarette and dope smoke – it was illegal to smoke in here, but sometimes the girls just couldn’t wait to run down the back stairs to the side door to the alley. While the hair-spray was still fresh, Skye scooped a handful of gold glitter out of her jar, held her fist as high as she could over her head, and opened it, turning on her toes at the same time so the gold dust landed evenly on her hair, sticking to the hairspray: the final touch.
    ‘You love your glitter dust, baby doll,’ Maria, the house mom, said from her cosy nest in her battered old armchair. ‘How much do you blow on that stuff every week?’
    ‘Hey, better on my hair than up my nose!’ Skye retorted, which caused Jada, pulling on a leather bra at the other side of the dressing room, to crack up with laughter.
    ‘ Right ,’ she commented. ‘Like it’s one or the other.’
    Skye grinned at Maria over her shoulder. Hired by the management to run the dressing room and keep a lid on trouble, Maria was always there, refereeing conflicts, pouring oil on the waters, eternally ready with a needle and thread for rips in costumes. Often house moms in strip clubs were ex-dancers themselves, but tiny, wizened Maria had never been that glamorous. She’d been a costume maker for years, till her eyes got too strained. Now she sat, every day from noon until closing, in her big armchair, a piece of knitting on her lap, and a big mug of coffee, laced with something stronger, on a table at her side, and though her eyesight wasn’t up to sewing on sequins for hours on end, she never missed a thing that went on in her dressing room.
    ‘It’s gonna be a good night,’ Jada said, lifting her surgically enhanced breasts one after the other and settling them into the bra cups. ‘There’s a real buzz out there. I can smell it.’
    ‘All you can smell right now is hairspray, honey,’ Maria cackled, as Skye pulled on a gold G-string and wriggled into two shiny gold stretch tubes, one barely covering her breasts, the other doing the same for her bottom. ‘Skye, honey, you wanna coffee before you start work?’
    ‘Sure,’ Skye said, taking a polystyrene cup from the wobbly stack on the table.
    Maria reached for a Thermos and poured Skye a cup.
    ‘You wanna top-up?’ she asked, winking.
    This was a special favour, and you couldn’t say no. Maria was already pulling a bottle from its hiding place down by the side of her chair. Skye perched on a battered chair, too ripped up to be used in the club any longer, as Maria laced the coffee with Kahlúa.
    ‘Hits the spot, huh?’ Maria said, as Skye took her first sip.
    How many times had Skye heard Maria say that? Thousands, probably. How many nights had she sat here, drinking coffee, coming up or coming down, listening to the girls chatter and bitch and fight?
    ‘Hit me too, Maria,’ Jada said, a six-foot Amazon with pale mocha skin in her black leather bra and panties, and black spike heels, coming over with a cup of her own.
    ‘Girl, you look like a porn warrior,’ Skye giggled.
    Jada threw her hip sideways and clenched a fist, posing hard. ‘I will lap dance the fuck out of you!’ she said menacingly.
    Skye finished her coffee and stood up, whooping to get herself into the zone.
    ‘OK!’ she said, throwing her cup into the trash. ‘Let’s go and take those suckers out there for everything they’ve got!’
    ‘From your mouth to God’s ear,’ Jada said devoutly.
    They looked at themselves for a moment in the mirror.
    ‘We are so going for different markets,’ Jada giggled, towering over her friend.
    Skye was the archetypal American blonde, with rounded cheeks and a pouty pink mouth; she had the full, lush features of a teenager, or the baby doll for which Maria had nicknamed her. But her figure was pure Barbie, with implausible